Famine confirmed in Gaza for first time, says UN-backed report

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system said 514,000 people - nearly a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza - are experiencing famine and that was due to rise to 641,000 by the end of September. Keystone-SDA

Famine has been declared in a northern part of the Gaza Strip, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, which is used by governments and international aid agencies to identify hunger levels around the world.

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Famine affects the administrative district of Gaza, which includes the city of Gaza, the analysis said. According to the monitor, the lives of 132,000 children under the age of five are especially at risk due to malnutrition. Of these, 41,000 are considered to be particularly serious cases, twice as many as in the previous assessment in May.

According to the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO), this is the first time that a famine has been declared in a Middle Eastern region.

“An immediate ceasefire and end to the conflict is critical to allow unimpeded, large-scale humanitarian response that can save lives,” the UN agencies FAO/UNICEF/WHO/WFP said in a joint press release on Friday.

Israel’s foreign ministry said there is no famine in Gaza, responding to the report.

Strict criteria for declaring famine

Three criteria must be met before a famine can be declared: at least 20% of households are affected by an extreme food shortage, at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children per 10,000 inhabitants die every day from hunger or due to the combination of malnutrition and disease.

All three are true, Jean-Martin Bauer from the World Food Programme (WFP) told journalists in Geneva.

The IPC initiative was founded in 2004. Its members include almost two dozen UN organisations and aid agencies. It is responsible for assessing hunger situations around the world. In the IPC scale, there are five levels of the food situation in a country or region. The highest – and worst – is level five: “catastrophe/famine”. Below this, we talk about hunger crises. Until now, level four (“emergency”) applied to the entire Gaza Strip.

According to IPC data, four famines have been confirmed in the past 15 years: 2011 in Somalia, 2017 and 2020 in South Sudan, and most recently 2024 in Sudan.

Translated from German by DeepL/sb

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